King being an idiot, debunked on Dispatches

Steve King continues to be an embarrassment to Iowa, and his idiotic statements are debunked by people with brains.

Read it here.

And speaking of Michele Bachmann...

If you want a clear example of the kind of batshit crazy that the religious right is pushing into positions of power, just spend some time with the Wikipedia entry on Michele Bachmann.  Don't blindly trust the article itself, check out its cited sources.  They're not making this stuff up.

• Holds a degree from Oral Roberts University
• Opposes phasing out incandescent light bulbs, believing that the government has no right to tell consumers what kind of light bulbs they can buy, but favors federal legislation banning online poker
• Claims that homosexuals suffer from sexual dysfunction and sexual identity disorders, and that gays are specifically targeting children
• Believes that evolution is unproven, and that intelligent design should be taught in public schools
• Belongs to a church that believes the Pope is the antichrist, but doesn't have the guts to admit that publicly
• Calls for the investigation of "anti-American" members of the Obama administration, and then, with no sense of irony at all, calls for armed revolution over environmental legislation
• And it just goes on and on and on...

Folks, this is what you get when fundamentalist morons get together in large groups and use their tax-exempt war chests to push their toadies into elected office.

P.Z. defends human-nonhuman hybrid research

P.Z. Meyers, over at Pharyngula, makes a great defense of research involving the mixing of human and non-human cell material.  Here's the best bit:

• "Look, Hughes, let's face up to reality. You aren't promoting this ban because you have any knowledge of the science; if you knew anything about the subject, you'd know that culturing cells of different species is common. Those cell lines to which George W Bush limited government-funded research? Many of them are grown on beds of mouse feeder cells. We could grow specific human cell lines on human feeder cells, but you'd freak out over that, too. There are gene mapping procedures that use fused rodent/human cells to produce cell lines with partial chromosomal losses. Monoclonal antibodies are made by combining immune system cells with immortalized cancer cell lines. And then there's the ultimate miscegenation: bacterial cells made with copies of human genes, to make human gene products, like insulin. You look old enough that if you aren't diabetic yourself, you probably have friends who are…and they're shooting up the product of a human-non-human hybrid. Are you going to ban those next?"

Click here for the whole post.